Why do people put meaningless words in "Well" "Uh" in conversation?

byamslerPIX

When talking something, there is no meaning, but what makes a mouth talking with the word "hmmm" "umo". The result of research on the question "Why does a person put in meaningless words such as" um, "" umo "before words?Bulletin of the National Academy of SciencesWas announced.

Nouns slow down speech across structurally and culturally diverse languages ​​| PNAS
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/05/09/1800708115

Why You Say 'Um' Before Certain Words
https://www.livescience.com/62630-why-you-pause-um-before-nouns.html

Be a linguistFrank SeffertMr. and colleagues' research team is working on tropical rainforests in Europe / North Africa / Mexico / Siberia / Himalayas / AmazonKalahari DesertWe recorded people's everyday conversation in various areas such as. And the research team analyzed 288,484 words of speech samples spanning nine languages ​​and investigated the speed of utterance.

As a result, the speed of everyday conversation is not always constant in any of the languages, and it turns out that the utterance speed is constantly fluctuating, as soon as you speak and slowly speak. Analysis of researchers focusing on "nouns" and "verbs" among the words used in the conversation found that tendencies were found in which the utterance speed tended to slow down in front of nouns.

The relation between speech speed, verb, and noun was a feature common to all nine languages. In addition, there seems to be 60% more percentage of meaningless words such as "hmm" "ehot" appearing before nouns or silence before nouns compared to the verbs.

byRick-Star

The research team said that they also investigated the point that "Before complicated verbs not used in everyday life, silence and meaningless words are included as much as nouns?", But it is still a complicated A lot of silence and meaningless words were inserted before general nouns rather than verbs.

Nouns are used when bringing new or unexpected information to the content communicated by a conversation, sometimes it is necessary to replace or omit pronouns. Therefore, when speaking nouns, it seems that more constraints will arise than when speaking verbs. According to the fact that the complex nature of nouns exceeds the complexity of verbs, the research team speculates that it is easy to accompany words such as "hmm" and "ehott" before nouns.

"This research result not only clarified the occurrence condition of the word" Umm "" Well "but also in languages ​​with wide diversity in grammar and culture, certain common points are found in the audio rhythm including the utterance speed It is an indication that there is something, "Mr. Seifert said.

byChris Drackett